Singers: The Bear of Montparnasse

He looks like a big shaggy beast that has been out in the rain. Rumpled suit, tangled hair, drooping moustache, he lumbers onto the stage and stares in shy bewilderment at the audience. Rivulets of sweat stream down his face. He hikes one stumpy leg onto a straight-back chair, lazily scratches his guitar and sings. The voice is honest, pleasant, but nothing special. Yet when Georges Brassens sings, all Paris cocks an ear.

Laughless Days. Brassens, 43, known around Montparnasse as the “Bear,” comes out of seclusion to sing only three months out of the year. Last week he was holding forth before jampacked audiences at Paris’ Bobino Theater. He sang of the brutalities of war, the vagaries of love, the folly of politics, and the hardships of being a gravedigger (“Farewell, poor dead one; if from the bottom of the hole one sees God, tell him how much pain that last shovelful cost me”), or a streetwalker: Even though those damned bourgeois call them girls of pleasure, It’s not every day that they laugh, golly, golly,

It’s not every day that they laugh.

In Brave Margot, he told of a simple shepherdess who breast-feeds a motherless kitten, a spectacle that attracts all the menfolk in the village. His signature song is The Bad Reputation, which he cites as his personal credo:

In the village, without bragging, I have a bad reputation . . .

I do not harm anybody, going along my own simple way,

But the good people don’t like to see

One follow another road than theirs.

Everyone slanders me, save the mutes, of course.

New Form. Everyone from taxi drivers to statesmen quotes his whimsical, rustic verses, many of which are too racy to be aired over the radio. He has sold nearly 1,000,000 record albums, as well as 50,000 copies of a $30 collection of his songs. For his opening at the Bobino, he received 10,072 letters of congratulation from his adoring fans.

Nervous, introverted, Brassens does not savor the notoriety. Son of a Flemish bricklayer, he was raised in the Mediterranean village of Séte. He quit school before graduating and, at 18, worked at odd jobs, wrote poetry and bummed around the cafes. In 1952, friends took him to a tiny club run by Patachou, Paris’ famed chanteuse, and goaded him into singing. One week later he was the sensation of Paris.

A bachelor, Brassens lives on a deadend alley in Montparnasse with an aged couple, who befriended him in his lean years, and a menagerie of pets. Two members of the French Academy, Novelist Joseph Kessel and Film Maker Marcel Pagnol, have been promoting the initiation of Brassens into the august Academy as “one of the greatest contemporary poets, a modern troubadour who represents a new literary form.”